In between the lines is the only place you'll find
What you're missing

March 13th, 1890 — Ministry Conference Room

It's important, she'd said in her first letter, but it wasn't important enough to handle that day, or the following day, or the one after that. This was so very much in line with his expectations for the Ministry — and so contrary to what he would have expected from Zelda — that he didn't know what to think. Should he be worried? Was it even important? And if it was, what did that word mean, important? It could have meant that he was dying, for all he knew, but that had started to seem increasingly unlikely the more distance he had from the day he'd met her on the ship. He still didn't have any symptoms, or at least none that he'd noticed. It was most likely about the Voyager, then, as she'd said in her letter. While that should have been a relief, it only made him more anxious to know what was coming. He was reasonably certain that he wasn't dying, after all; he had no proof that the same was true for the Voyager. He hadn't even been to see her since his last encounter with Zelda there on the twenty-first.

He arrived too early, but the Welcome Witch who showed him up to the room let him wait inside and even offered him tea. He turned her down; he didn't think tea would help his nerves. He just wanted to hear what the news was. And, more and more, he was starting to wish that someone other than Zelda was around to deliver it. If she was just going to be all Cold Ministry Official about it, anyway, scheduling so-called important meetings nearly a week after telling him she had something to say.

Alfred was already sitting when she entered, and remained so, but straightened slightly in his chair. "Hey," he said, not sure what sort of greeting was appropriate for this sort of meeting — even setting aside their history, which was impossible to do. "So, uh — what's the news?"

@"Zelda Fisk"

  

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

She could not be mad at him at work. She could not be mad at him at work. She could not be mad at him at work, not when she was the one who called him here, not when the boat had occupied so much of her time lately. Zelda looked tired; the ink stains on her hands were not fully faded, she had been working late pretty much since the last time she had seen him, strands of her hair were escaping her braid. The sleeves of her blouse were rolled up and she did not remember when she had done so. In short, the Voyager was kicking her ass, and this was the first morning in weeks she had not already been on the boat at this time.

She came in exactly on time - a purposeful gesture - notebook in hand.

"Good morning," Zelda said, "I - there's a couple points of it. We can start with the boat, or with the crew, or with - um, you, I guess."

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AMAZING set by MJ

Good morning. That was the appropriate greeting, he realized. Well, whatever. If she was going to go looking for reasons to distance herself from him, that wasn't going to be the most prominent one, he didn't think. She looked a mess, but he knew better than to comment on it, and in fact he tried to pretend he didn't notice the tired look or the ink-stained hands or anything like that. What business did he have, noticing those things? He was here in his capacity as the Captain of the Voyager, she as a member of the team working on de-cursing his ship. That was all they were to each other this morning.

Alfred noticeably tensed as she continued. The Voyager, the crew, and him? He had been expecting news on the first front, and passively dreading news on the last, but this was the first time he'd heard, in any sort of official capacity, that his crew might be at all affected. This was going to be a mess — no matter how serious it was. And hopefully it wasn't terribly serious, because if his crew were badly affected that meant that he was likely doomed. He'd gone through the process of losing a crew once before — over a long period, in varied and sometimes rather horrific ways — and he had no desire to go through it again. Particularly not if his own strength was failing him at the same time.

"The crew," he answered, mouth dry.

  

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

"As long as they didn't touch it directly, they should be alright," Zelda reported. She sat across from him and lay her palms flat on the table so she would not rub her eyes. "But you should tell them that they ought to report here within the next six days so we can check in on them." If she pretended he was just a regular person, then this would be fine. Of course, if he was just a regular person, she would not have burned herself out trying to fix this for him.

"And that will probably allow me to figure out who smuggled it onto the boat," she added, "As they'll probably have a higher level of the Pictish magic in their system." Although really, she wasn't sure on this - the smuggling had never been her number one concern. Besides, Zelda was half-convinced that fear of death would lead their culprit to confess once they were brought in.

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AMAZING set by MJ

"No one touched it except me," he assured her immediately. It was a fact that he'd mentioned to the Ministry before, but given how lax they were about remembering things he'd already told them, generally, it seemed to bear repeating. He supposed he didn't know definitely that no one had handled it when it was being brought onboard, but that was the theory he was working under. The smuggler, whoever they were, had probably brought it on themselves in secret and stashed it away in the cargo hold after it had been filled with other goods and wares. After he'd made the attempt to open it, he'd had it levitated up to his cabin, for that exact reason — he didn't want anyone near the thing when he wasn't sure exactly what it was or what it was doing, particularly when it seemed to have some strange magical properties about it.

"And the smuggler," he allowed. He still didn't know who it was, so sending the crew in to be checked over by the Ministry was appealing in that regard — it would allow them to pinpoint who the reckless fool on his crew was and get them arrested. Assuming it was someone on the crew who had smuggled it in. It was possible that someone could have come aboard with it and left it there, then departed themselves — but for what purpose? Smuggling just seemed to make more sense than someone out to strew chaos around the world.

It was a huge relief to hear that the crew were likely unaffected, but that condition that she'd added — as long as they didn't touch it — didn't bode particularly well for him. His heart rate picked up slightly and he fiddled with the button on one of his sleeves, a nervous habit he hadn't engaged in for several months now. He ought to save the worst news for last, he decided, but he wasn't sure whether he expected the news regarding the Voyager or himself to be worse. He was dreading learning more details about either, because nothing about Zelda's appearance today suggested that she was proud of herself for having successfully de-cursed anything, or solved anything. The news was going to be bad; it was just a matter of how bad.

"What about the ship?" he decided to ask next.

  

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

This wasn't supposed to be this hard.

She had delivered death notifications before, and this was just a boat, even if it was a boat that they both cared about. But Zelda was tired, and she had promised to try, and when she told Alfred about his boat he was never going to forgive her. She looked at her hands on the table and tapped her index finger against the tabletop.

"I've stopped the curse from spreading further and have managed to remove it from some of the more external parts of the boat, like the mast," she said. That that had taken so long was testament to how difficult the curse was; it turned out that when civilizations left no written record, removing their curses was harder. Zelda could have guessed at that, but it was one thing to guess and another to know, painfully.

"But it's manifested more fully in other areas. Especially the cabin. And the magic is becoming - aware of me," Zelda said, "As well as other people, if they're on board. And it's not friendly." It was all fun and games until one was repeatedly flung up the ladderwell by an ancient spell.

Curses wanted - to get you out, or to kill you, or to get you to do something. Once you knew exactly what that was, it was easier to deal with them. She had not figured this one out yet - it had not killed her, or tried very hard, and it seemed content to remain where it was. If it wanted to take up a lot of her time, to exhaust her - then it was winning.

"I have ideas," she said, "To make it so the Voyager can safely sail. But they're going to take me a while. And I don't know if they'll work."

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   Jupiter Smith

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AMAZING set by MJ

Alfred wasn't aware that he'd been holding his breath until she finished and he started to breath again. This wasn't good news, of course, but it was far better than what he'd been expecting. He'd thought Zelda was going to condemn her outright, or tell him she could never sail again. She'd said it was going to take a while, but a while was not forever. And if she was going to try, then there was hope, even if she didn't know whether it would work. He wasn't going to give up on the ship if Zelda wasn't ready to do that yet.

"Alright," he said with a nod. "What kind of ideas? What do you need from me?"

Merlin help him, if he was told at the end of this meeting to just go back to his flat and continue waiting around for some sort of progress to be made, he was going to go insane. There had to be something he could do to help, even if it was stupid and trivial and the sort of thing they could send any old intern to do. It was his ship, after all; he didn't want to just sit around twiddling his thumbs while someone else worked to make her well.

  

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

Zelda looked up at him, startled. She had been determined to avoid eye contact with Alfred as much as possible, but she was startled enough to look him in the eye. She regretted it almost immediately; there was suddenly a heady mixture of guilt and anxiety in her chest.

"You haven't even asked about yourself yet," Zelda said, shock easing its way into her tone.

She didn't even know what she would ask him to do; Alfred was not the best with spellwork. And she ought not spend too much time with him. But she clearly could not do this on her own. So she would accept the help, although it was certainly a bad idea - the department was stretched too thin right now for her to deny it. But she felt like she should at least remind him, first, that the boat was not more important than his life.

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   J. Alfred Darrow

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AMAZING set by MJ

Alfred nearly flinched at her reminder. He had been significantly more worried about the Voyager than about himself, that was true — but it wasn't that he was being reckless, it was that he didn't feel cursed, and it was hard to be worried about something that had made no impact on his life. The Voyager, on the other hand, had a direct and immediate impact, because he wasn't allowed to sail her anywhere — and he'd seen some actual evidence that there was something amiss with her, even if it had just been the twitchy wand thing that he didn't know enough about to interpret. So when she'd told him there was a chance that the Voyager could be salvaged and made ready to sail again, he'd been quite content to focus on that for the moment. It was a silver lining in this otherwise rather bleak year — and who knew? After she told him whatever she needed to tell him about how the cursed chest had affected him, he might need a silver lining.

"Alright," he said wearily. "What's — ah, how did —" he started, but his mouth was too dry and he didn't even know what words to use.

  

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

Zelda regretted her tone. she owed him a good explanation. She frowned, steeled her shoulders, and kept looking Alfred in the eye. "The curse bound a part of itself to you," she explained carefully, "When you touched the object. I've been researching what that means." The time on the boat, the time in the library - the ink on her hands.

"When the curse decides you're a threat - and no one is sure when that will happen - it's going to try to... hurt you," Zelda said, "Badly. It might try to kill you." The uncertainty was a part of the problem. Zelda was no Ravenclaw, but she was process-oriented, determined - she liked to get answers. That she had to talk to him without answers was frustrating to her.

"I am trying to break it. We - we are going to try to break it. But it's so old. No one knows how," she explained. Not the cursebreakers, not MA&C, not any Artifacts healer she had talked to. And Alfred was just one person. He wasn't even a spectacularly important person. The Ministry had other problems.

Her hands were steady on the table. Her tone was shaky, but she was trying to project calm - holding his gaze. Her leg was not bouncing up and down. She owed him this seriousness, this professionalism - she was furious with him but she owed him something, because she did not think that she could save him.

"Can I see your hands? Or - whichever hand you touched it with."

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   J. Alfred Darrow

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AMAZING set by MJ

Alfred's chest tightened as she spoke. It had been easy to put off worrying about whatever the curse had done to him when he had no symptoms, but if what she was saying was correct, the fact that he had no symptoms was just a sinister facet of this particular curse: that he might never know what it was doing, until it was too late. He would, in essence, be walking around with a death sentence, working on borrowed time — and he wouldn't even know how much time he had until it was over.

There had to be more information she could give him. He wanted to ask so many questions. How did they know that any of it had been attached to him at all? What sorts of actions were likely to be perceived as threatening by a curse that had outlasted the civilization that built it? What did this actually mean for him, practically speaking? But she had said the curse was old, and no one had the answers — so was it even worth the breath the ask?

It took him a second to respond to her request. His brain was still working hard to catch up to this new reality and try to come to terms with it, or at least come to terms with it enough to go on functioning in the near future. After a difficult pause, he stretched his hands out on the table towards her, palms up. "I think it was both," he said very quietly.

  

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

Zelda steeled herself. "We don't know much about the Picts anymore," she said, moving so that her elbows rested on the table, instead of her palms. "But we know that they painted themselves." For battles, mostly, at least according to the Romans. This was the only information that she could give him, and providing it was going to hurt - she could sense the bruise coming, for all that she could not avoid it. She could no longer look him in the eyes; that was too hard.

Zelda reached out and touched her fingertips to his palms, the lightest of touches. She was focusing on being professional, for all that her cheeks were definitely flushing.

She wished someone else had this case; she wished that she could have asked someone else to do this meeting without incriminating herself. But this was Alfred, and she owed him this - she was furious with him, but she owed him this because he was dying and because he had, at least at one point,  cared about her. And because she still cared, even if he didn't. 

"I think that as the curse activates, paint will appear on your hands," Zelda said, her voice barely above a whisper. "A swirling pattern, like this." She mimicked the pattern they had seen on several of the objects, her pulse racing.

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AMAZING set by MJ

The feeling of her fingertips against his palms, light as it was, sent little shivers down his spine. He glanced up at her as she talked, but Zelda wasn't looking at him, only at his hands. A part of him wished that she would look at him while she was, in essence, giving him the details of his death sentence — but a different part of him was glad she was just looking at his hands. If they were both looking at each other the tension and emotion that was lingering in the air might become too palpable to ignore. He'd probably end up looking away, rather than addressing it, which would make him the coward here.

"How long would it take to 'activate'?" he asked softly, glancing back down at his hands. Would it be better or worse if it was a long lead time? On the one hand, he'd be able to take notice and do something to tidy up his affairs, or say goodbye. On the other hand, that would mean that he'd know — for hours, or maybe days, he'd have this knowledge lingering above him, and he'd be able to keep looking down at his hand and checking the curse's progress, dreading the inevitable completion. "Is it — do you think there would be warning?"

  

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

Zelda stopped tracing the patterns, but left her fingertips touching his palms. Unprofessional, she admonished herself, but she wanted so much more.

She also looked up -she owed him eye contact, for this. "At least fifteen minutes," she said. Her tone was measured but her throat felt thick, her voice a little off - she had not realized quite how emotional she was until now. "More if you're lucky. But from everything I've been able to find and test - should be fifteen minutes." Fifteen minutes wasn't good, but it wasn't a death sentence - it was a warning. And books and spells and research and references had led her here, telling him this.

"I would know better, but spells like this haven't activated for anyone, recently," Zelda said, "So - I can only guarantee you fifteen minutes."

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   J. Alfred Darrow

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AMAZING set by MJ

Fifteen minutes.

That was no time at all. Fifteen minutes, and they had no idea what might trigger it. They didn't even really know what the effects would be, but Zelda had said he could die, and if Zelda was saying that, Alfred could almost certainly die. If there was a better version of this to tell him, she would have chosen that, wouldn't she? She cared, at least a little — she cared, though he didn't know why, anymore — and all she could give him was fifteen minutes.

He felt as though the world had stopped as she'd spoken, but really it was just two things: his breath had hitched in his chest, and she'd left her hands on his. The breath made sense, because he was in shock — he knew enough about this to know, in a sort of abstract, distant way, that he was in shock — but why were her hands still there? A comforting gesture, maybe — some version of pity. A nod to the intimacy they'd had, once, and wouldn't ever have again. Fifteen minutes.

"Oh," he said, and that was all. What else could he say? He regretted ever having touched the chest, but that, he supposed, went without saying — and he still didn't know, looking back on it, what he could have done differently, given the scenario as it had presented itself at the time. He could have not been on the ship at all, but that was the only thing that could have changed his fate in any significant way. He could have not been heading to India, but that — tracing that train of thought lead right back to her, because he'd decided to go to India after she hadn't returned his letter.

That was what he could have said, when all was said and done. He could have said I'm sorry I scared you off with that stupid letter; I'm sorry I was pushing for something more when there wasn't anything else you could give. If he'd just been content to do things properly, to keep his head down and save up and try again in another few months, none of this would have happened. He wouldn't have ruined things with Zelda, and he wouldn't have had to go to India to forget about how he'd ruined things with Zelda, and consequently he would not be cursed and possibly dying at any point within the next fifteen minutes.

But he didn't know where to start, and he didn't know what the point would be, now that it didn't much matter one way or another what had happened in November, so he didn't voice any of the sudden rush of thoughts and emotions overwhelming him. Instead, he left it at oh.

  

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

This was always what she had feared - that Alfred would go off on an adventure and get himself killed. Except this was worse, because now she could see it coming, and her heart was hammering against the inside of her ribs. Oh. She should have requested a different assignment as soon as she learned it was his boat, but she hadn't, and now she was watching him react to the news that he might die. And this had to be so much worse than the adventure, the tipping point that was coming, and neither of them knew when.

"Hey," she said.

She didn't know what to follow up with - there was so much she wanted to say, and her eyes were misty. He had left her and now he might actually leave her, and she did not know what to say. Zelda blinked. It didn't matter that he called her Miss Fisk and complained about her to her friend, it didn't matter that he was so colossally indifferent to her - she just wanted to help him.

Zelda pressed her fingertips harder into his palms, just enough that there was a real pressure between them.

"I'm not giving up," she said, her voice barely above a whisper, "And neither should you."

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AMAZING set by MJ